In a world where the environment is changing quickly, more and more leading-edge companies are investing in new technologies to solve our growing problems associated with climate change. We take a look at some of the most promising investment opportunities and technological developments – from green sustainable business practices to full-blown geoengineering solutions.

Are We Having an Environmental Emergency?

Over in the UK, the topic of climate change is heating up (or hotting up, as the Brits say.)

Young environmental activist Greta Thunberg speaks to the UK Parliament about the dangers of climate change.

In response, the leader of the official opposition party, Labor’s Jeremy Corbyn, and Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, have both declared an environmental emergency for the UK. On the other hand, the conservative Tory government in power has remained rather silent on the issue, perhaps relieved that for once people are not talking about the Brexit neverendum crisis that‘s consumed all the oxygen in the room during the past three years.

But is there an environmental emergency? You certainly wouldn’t think so by following most press reports in the US. Even the set of energy conservation measures packaged up as The Green New Deal (GND) haven’t gotten much scrutiny, having been derailed by other GND proposals altogether unrelated to energy conservation (such as universal income) which captured the public debate.

Nevertheless, recent sobering documents released by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the US Department of Defense (DOD), the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other government agencies and commissions point to serious trouble ahead for the planet if we don’t take decisive action:

Business Investment in Green Technology Ventures is Growing

An increasing number of entrepreneurs, investors, and businesses are looking beyond the despair of environmental problems caused by climate change and, instead, see a golden business opportunity.

Let’s take a look at some of the major investments in green technology and sustainable business practices leading the way:

The veteran money manager Jeremy Grantham, co-founder of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO), is famous for his financial prowess: he had the prescience to anticipate both the 2000 tech bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. In a speech titled “The Race of Our Lives,” Grantham dedicated $1 billion of his fortune (98%) to solving the climate crisis before the world’s systems (especially agricultural food production) collapse due to rising temperatures.

Problem 1: Tragedy of the Commons — Global Pollution

Unlike China, whose command economy can dictate massive changes (such as the current mandate to switch the auto industry to an EV-only car fleet), we live in a market-based, capitalist democracy. Yet sometimes traditional market-based solutions to problems fail to solve problems when there are no direct costs associated with using shared resources, such as polluting the air we breathe. Economists call this the “tragedy of the commons,” and while laws and regulations can work, creating incentives (such as pollution “cap and trade” programs with “carbon trading credits”) have been very effective in encouraging industry to protect the environment without incurring the market distortion that can result from complex regulations. Entrepreneurs, such as Fabrice Le Saché working in Africa, have developed a profitable business, Ecosur Afrique, that takes advantage of the Clean Development Mechanism established under the Kyoto Protocol to provide a trading platform for companies to reduce their C02 emissions.

As we’ve written about before, companies such as Plastic Whale and Orgatec are using plastics discarded in the world’s waterways to create useful consumer goods, including carpets and upholstery products.

Solution: Investing in Alternative Fuels for Transportation

Electric passenger vehicles, while not universal, are pretty common these days – of course, they are only as green as the power source that creates the electricity they use.* Electric trucks will be next, replacing a mostly diesel fleet that not only produces heat trapping gasses but also black carbon soot particulates associated with premature lung disease and the melting of polar ice caps.

*Recycling battery components and precious rare-earth minerals is also an important environmental consideration.

Part Two: Will Sustainable Business Practices Work or Will We Need to Turn to Extreme Geo-Engineering Solutions to Fix the Planet?

In the first part of this article, we looked at business investments in technology designed to reduce fossil fuel consumption while ramping up sustainable business practices. But will it be enough? In this second part, we look at more interventionist Geo-Engineering solutions designed to “fix” the planet.

In his annual letter to the public, Bill Gates offers a sobering conclusion: “Scientists say that to avoid these dramatic long-term changes to the climate, the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80 percent by 2050, and eliminate them entirely by the end of the century. When I first heard this, I was surprised. Can’t we just aim to cut carbon emissions in half? I asked many scientists. But they all agreed that wouldn’t be enough. The problem is that CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for decades. Even if we halted carbon emissions tomorrow, the temperature would still rise because of the carbon that’s already been released. No, we need to get all the way down to zero.”

Bill Gates asks: “How can we ever reduce a number like 36 billion tons to zero?” Here is his equation showing the problem: (P world population) x (S services) x (E energy needed per service) x (C the amount of carbon emitted per each unit of energy) = C02 in the atmosphere. Gates concludes that C needs to drop to zero.

Is Geo-Engineering the Solution?

If we can’t control the amount of C02 emissions we release into the atmosphere, what’s our Plan B? We may need to take dramatic steps to actively “repair” the damage we’ve done to the planet – by undertaking what’s known as “Geo-Engineering.”

This example illustrates some of the ethical issues with Geo-Engineering. For starters, the Soviet action was utterly lacking in transparency: the rural residents of Belarus were not informed at the time that dangerous radioactive material fell on their homes, fields, crops, and woodlands.

Indeed, scientists, ethicists, policy analysts, economists, and politicians are beginning to contemplate how to manage the process of undertaking large-scale, global geo-engineering projects. The questions they must ask include:

Researchers have observed that algae populations at the surface of the oceans near the poles have the potential to “eat” a large amount of carbon dioxide, but, being away from land, they lack sufficient access to iron minerals to digest the gas efficiently. The idea would be to seed the ocean surfaces with iron ore, to “fertilize” the algae to encourage it to digest C02 and excrete it, where it would, theoretically, fall safely to the sea bed.

What if we undertook a massive program to replant the lost trees around the world? The startup company BioCarbon is using drone-based, tree seed “bombing” technology to replant trees in difficult to reach areas, at a scale that would be difficult to achieve with manual tree planting methods – at only 20% of the cost. BioCarbon Engineering’s CEO Lauren Fletcher believes that 60 teams equipped with the drone technology could plant a billion trees each year, putting the goal of achieving a net annual increase of trees within reach (by scaling up the operations even further).

Build a Sustainable Manufacturing Future with Formaspace

If you can imagine it, we can build it.

Formaspace not only builds top-quality industrial furniture here at our Austin, Texas factory headquarters, we can also help you redesign your facilities to work more efficiently by designing new processes and custom designs unique to your specific needs.

In a world where the environment is changing quickly, more and more leading-edge companies are investing in new technologies to solve our growing problems associated with climate change. We take a look at some of the most promising investment opportunities and technological developments – from green sustainable business practices to full-blown geoengineering solutions.

Are We Having an Environmental Emergency?

Over in the UK, the topic of climate change is heating up (or hotting up, as the Brits say.)

Young environmental activist Greta Thunberg speaks to the UK Parliament about the dangers of climate change.

In response, the leader of the official opposition party, Labor’s Jeremy Corbyn, and Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, have both declared an environmental emergency for the UK. On the other hand, the conservative Tory government in power has remained rather silent on the issue, perhaps relieved that for once people are not talking about the Brexit neverendum crisis that‘s consumed all the oxygen in the room during the past three years.

But is there an environmental emergency? You certainly wouldn’t think so by following most press reports in the US. Even the set of energy conservation measures packaged up as The Green New Deal (GND) haven’t gotten much scrutiny, having been derailed by other GND proposals altogether unrelated to energy conservation (such as universal income) which captured the public debate.

Nevertheless, recent sobering documents released by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the US Department of Defense (DOD), the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other government agencies and commissions point to serious trouble ahead for the planet if we don’t take decisive action:

Business Investment in Green Technology Ventures is Growing

An increasing number of entrepreneurs, investors, and businesses are looking beyond the despair of environmental problems caused by climate change and, instead, see a golden business opportunity.

Let’s take a look at some of the major investments in green technology and sustainable business practices leading the way:

The veteran money manager Jeremy Grantham, co-founder of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO), is famous for his financial prowess: he had the prescience to anticipate both the 2000 tech bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. In a speech titled “The Race of Our Lives,” Grantham dedicated $1 billion of his fortune (98%) to solving the climate crisis before the world’s systems (especially agricultural food production) collapse due to rising temperatures.

Problem 1: Tragedy of the Commons — Global Pollution

Unlike China, whose command economy can dictate massive changes (such as the current mandate to switch the auto industry to an EV-only car fleet), we live in a market-based, capitalist democracy. Yet sometimes traditional market-based solutions to problems fail to solve problems when there are no direct costs associated with using shared resources, such as polluting the air we breathe. Economists call this the “tragedy of the commons,” and while laws and regulations can work, creating incentives (such as pollution “cap and trade” programs with “carbon trading credits”) have been very effective in encouraging industry to protect the environment without incurring the market distortion that can result from complex regulations. Entrepreneurs, such as Fabrice Le Saché working in Africa, have developed a profitable business, Ecosur Afrique, that takes advantage of the Clean Development Mechanism established under the Kyoto Protocol to provide a trading platform for companies to reduce their C02 emissions.

As we’ve written about before, companies such as Plastic Whale and Orgatec are using plastics discarded in the world’s waterways to create useful consumer goods, including carpets and upholstery products.

Solution: Investing in Alternative Fuels for Transportation

Electric passenger vehicles, while not universal, are pretty common these days – of course, they are only as green as the power source that creates the electricity they use.* Electric trucks will be next, replacing a mostly diesel fleet that not only produces heat trapping gasses but also black carbon soot particulates associated with premature lung disease and the melting of polar ice caps.

*Recycling battery components and precious rare-earth minerals is also an important environmental consideration.

Part Two: Will Sustainable Business Practices Work or Will We Need to Turn to Extreme Geo-Engineering Solutions to Fix the Planet?

In the first part of this article, we looked at business investments in technology designed to reduce fossil fuel consumption while ramping up sustainable business practices. But will it be enough? In this second part, we look at more interventionist Geo-Engineering solutions designed to “fix” the planet.

In his annual letter to the public, Bill Gates offers a sobering conclusion: “Scientists say that to avoid these dramatic long-term changes to the climate, the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80 percent by 2050, and eliminate them entirely by the end of the century. When I first heard this, I was surprised. Can’t we just aim to cut carbon emissions in half? I asked many scientists. But they all agreed that wouldn’t be enough. The problem is that CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for decades. Even if we halted carbon emissions tomorrow, the temperature would still rise because of the carbon that’s already been released. No, we need to get all the way down to zero.”

Bill Gates asks: “How can we ever reduce a number like 36 billion tons to zero?” Here is his equation showing the problem: (P world population) x (S services) x (E energy needed per service) x (C the amount of carbon emitted per each unit of energy) = C02 in the atmosphere. Gates concludes that C needs to drop to zero.

Is Geo-Engineering the Solution?

If we can’t control the amount of C02 emissions we release into the atmosphere, what’s our Plan B? We may need to take dramatic steps to actively “repair” the damage we’ve done to the planet – by undertaking what’s known as “Geo-Engineering.”

This example illustrates some of the ethical issues with Geo-Engineering. For starters, the Soviet action was utterly lacking in transparency: the rural residents of Belarus were not informed at the time that dangerous radioactive material fell on their homes, fields, crops, and woodlands.

Indeed, scientists, ethicists, policy analysts, economists, and politicians are beginning to contemplate how to manage the process of undertaking large-scale, global geo-engineering projects. The questions they must ask include:

Researchers have observed that algae populations at the surface of the oceans near the poles have the potential to “eat” a large amount of carbon dioxide, but, being away from land, they lack sufficient access to iron minerals to digest the gas efficiently. The idea would be to seed the ocean surfaces with iron ore, to “fertilize” the algae to encourage it to digest C02 and excrete it, where it would, theoretically, fall safely to the sea bed.

What if we undertook a massive program to replant the lost trees around the world? The startup company BioCarbon is using drone-based, tree seed “bombing” technology to replant trees in difficult to reach areas, at a scale that would be difficult to achieve with manual tree planting methods – at only 20% of the cost. BioCarbon Engineering’s CEO Lauren Fletcher believes that 60 teams equipped with the drone technology could plant a billion trees each year, putting the goal of achieving a net annual increase of trees within reach (by scaling up the operations even further).

Build a Sustainable Manufacturing Future with Formaspace

If you can imagine it, we can build it.

Formaspace not only builds top-quality industrial furniture here at our Austin, Texas factory headquarters, we can also help you redesign your facilities to work more efficiently by designing new processes and custom designs unique to your specific needs.